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3 2 6 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3flourish.” 37 While there was tension between reason and scripture, it was ahealthy tension. This may be considered the era of good academic feeling. Atno other time did the two poles exist in such harmony.Thomas Jefferson’s idea of education will shed some light on the understandingof the relationship between religion and philosophy that obtainedat the time. In his 1779 “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,”Jefferson contended that liberal education was an important part of equippingfree citizens to rule and be ruled in turn:Whereas it appeareth that however certain forms of government arebetter calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exerciseof their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves betterguarded against degeneracy, yet experience hath shewn, that evenunder the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, andby slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed thatthe most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, asfar as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especiallyto give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that,possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, theymay be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt toexert their natural powers to defeat its purposes. 38While Jefferson believed in the practical side of education, the deeper andmore serious moral elements were most important and those elements couldbe imparted without a strict adherence to religious instruction. This is thereason the student needed illumination: so that the use of his natural powersof reasoning could know and defend the ends of man. Liberal education alsohad the added benefit of revealing those worthy to serve the public in thedefense of public morals and natural rights:And whereas it is generally true that that people will be happiest whoselaws are best, and are best administered, and that laws will be wiselyformed, and honestly administered, in proportion as those who formand administer them are wise and honest; whence it becomes excellentfor promoting the publick happiness that those persons, whom nature37Ibid., 91. This is a remarkable occurrence in the early republic. While there were certainly fundamentalists,most religious Protestants were of one mind on this matter. They were not afraid of debateand seemed to believe that scripture, or the Holy Spirit, had nothing to fear from an honest and freedebate about the ideas. I would contend that Marsden makes too much of scientific discovery of theEnlightenment as it pertained to Jefferson. Jefferson was concerned, as we shall see, with philosophyas well and the ability of reason to know moral truths that could not be determined via empiricalresearch.38Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” in The Works of ThomasJefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 2:414–15.